Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Nick Capper’s messy, charm-deficient stand-up has two settings: sneer and shout. Or three if you count it when he sneers and shouts at the same time.

He comes across as a bit of a loser, which he acknowledges in a brattish ‘life sucks’ sort of a way, and a bit of a dolt, which is more of a blind spot in his self-awareness. Talking of which, in an interview about making his festival debut, he boasted: ‘I’ve delayed it until I was really good so I could bring a show of this quality... This is the best of the best, it’s consistent, it’s hard hitting all the way through.’

Standing Room Only is actually waffly, insubstantial and very light on punchlines – barely enough for a ten-minute set, but stretched over 50 with a lot of filler. The least said about his laugh-free ideas for stage musicals, read off a scrap of paper while standing next to crude illustrations, the better.

His more conventional stand-up contains nothing of significance, not even his grandfather’s death, which is merely a segue into what a deadbeat town his grandparents lived in, and the smartarse comebacks he said to a cop there. It’s a jumping-off point, too, for the time he went to a casino, which he thought was a bit rubbish, and when on a European cruise, dominated by seniors, which he also didn’t enjoy. Triviality often works in comedy, but Capper ends up sounding like a spoilt whinger, rather than revealing anything about the situation.

When he is deliberately annoying, in his repetitive sketch suggesting a kids’ TV series about General Ming Ming, there’s a little more potential, but even so he’s not skilled enough to make this tricker approach reliably funny.

In one inconsequential story set in a furniture store, he encounters a man who mistakenly thinks Tears In Heaven is about Eric Clapton losing his hat, rather than the profound sense of loss about the tragic death of his son. In Standing Room Only, Capper has written a show about losing your hat.

He also riled the pedant in me from the start, making much of how he had to ‘back announce’ himself on to stage. It’s just ‘announce’. And while we’re at it, the George Michael song is not called Careless Whispers. Details are important: Even his T-shirt was a mistake, with the design of a Marvel comic-book cover offering too much to take in, distracting the audience from what he was saying.

If your T-shirt is more interesting than your show, it’s time for a rethink.

Review date: 19 Apr 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett